esiegel | October 30, 2009I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space... --Lord Byron, Darkness
Or, in other words, boo!
Halloween, believe it or not, is an astronomical holiday! The two solstices and two equinoxes are obvious astronomical holidays, since they correspond to the days of greatest, least, and equal daylight/night everywhere in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
But halfway in-between each solstice and equinox lie the cross-quarter days. Just as we still mark the winter solstice (almost) with Christmas and the…
esiegel | October 29, 2009The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you are likely to see. -- Winston Churchill
Sometimes, we point our most powerful telescopes at the sky, peering as deeply as we possibly can, hoping to shed some light on what the Universe was like oh-so-long ago, as close to the big bang as we can. The Hubble Space Telescope can get us distant galaxies as they were just a few billion years after the big bang.
But Hubble still has never seen one of the elusive, Holy Grails of astronomy: a metal-free star.
You see, immediately after the big bang, the Universe was filled with protons…
esiegel | October 28, 2009In 1908, a huge fireball streaked across the sky and exploded a few kilometers above the Earth's surface, downing trees for miles and miles around but leaving no impact crater on the ground. This mystery was known as the Tunguska event.
But how did this happen? The amount of energy released was estimated to be somewhere between 5 and 30 Megatons of TNT. (Comparably to a "typical" hydrogen bomb.) What could've caused this devastation?
My answer: a large meteor or small asteroid/comet could have done this easily. How? Let me explain.
When a meteor enters Earth's atmosphere, it's moving very,…
esiegel | October 26, 2009Perhaps you've been following my ongoing series on dark matter. Perhaps, like many, you're still skeptical. After all, it's not like we've gone and made it in a lab or discovered it in an experiment. 15 years after David Weinberg composed the Dark Matter Rap, we still don't know exactly what dark matter is.
But there's a whole lot that we do know about it just from looking out at the Universe.
You see, there are a whole bunch of scales we can see, from galaxies to clusters to superclusters and the large-scale structure of the Universe as a whole.
And-- since the big bang happened just under…
esiegel | October 26, 2009I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. --Isaac Newton
Can you imagine what good ol' Sir Isaac would've said, done, and thought if he could've looked up at the stars and seen what we see today?
Image credit: Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Just inspiring, awesome, and yes, this was all undiscovered to him and subsequent scientists for centuries. The…
esiegel | October 24, 2009Most of the time, I like to showcase some new music to you, or at least music that's new to me. But this week, I heard an old favorite for the first time in a long time. You're probably familiar with the Violent Femmes, but you may not have heard anything other than Blister in the Sun from them. That's not a bad song, but it isn't their best. Take a listen to Add It Up below and see if you agree:
Those of you who know me personally might know I have a taste for Mike Judge, including his very funny movie Idiocracy. One of the funniest parts of Idiocracy was their all-pervasive energy…
esiegel | October 23, 2009Seed Magazine (which I've written for) has just put out a space slideshow: Traveling Through Time and Stars.
Michael Benson gives an account -- in words and pictures -- of a journey outwards, from nearby stars to nebulae to other galaxies to clusters of galaxies. The pictures alone are worth having a look at.
Beautiful? I don't know that that even begins to describe it, but it certainly helps give me a great perspective on what these different regions look like.
The idea of zooming out and looking at things on larger and larger scales really appeals to me. In fact, I think the slideshow…
esiegel | October 22, 2009Yesterday, I showed you a video of an amazing incidence of magnetic levitation. There's another video, courtesy of Matthew Sullivan and his students, that demonstrates this equally as well:
What do you need to do to make this happen, and how does it work?
First off, you need to design a stable magnetic track. This is actually simpler than you might think; you just need three magnetic "lines", where the outer two go in one direction, and the inner one goes in the opposite direction:
Next, you need a high temperature superconductor, typically made of Yttrium, Barium, and Copper Oxide. This…
esiegel | October 21, 2009I don't understand French nearly well enough to understand the explanation in this video, but I was amazed at what the physical world can do when I saw this video.
(Video courtesy of Wimp.com.) What's going on here? Well, you've got:
a series of bar magnets on the bottom,
a ceramic cylinder,
an insulating, non-magnetic piece of plastic between the magnets and cylinder,
and liquid nitrogen being poured into the cylinder before the insulator's removed.
Amazing! For those of you who like puzzles, you've got until tomorrow's post goes up to figure it out. (I'll give you a hint: Walther…
esiegel | October 20, 2009Ever see a picture of a Solar Prominence before? If you have, you'll recognize these loop-like features leaving the Sun's surface and ending up in the Sun's corona:
Well two spacecraft designed to monitor the Sun, Stereo A (which stands for "Ahead" of Earth) and Stereo B (which stands for "Behind") just imaged a 30-hour Solar Prominence during September 26th and 27th. What did they find?
This video, which gives three minutes worth of spectacular views of this eruption on the Sun. Have a look:
Thanks to APOD for providing the snapshot that inspired this!
esiegel | October 19, 2009If people around you aren't going anywhere, if their dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the corner, or if they're dragging you down, get rid of them. Negative people can sap your energy so fast, and they can take your dreams from you, too.
--Earvin "Magic" Johnson
As far as science goes, we all have our own dreams. For me, it's to understand the largest scales in the Universe: the most massive structures, the highest energies, and the earliest times of existence.
Particle physicists are also after understanding the Universe at its highest energies, and that's one of the primary goals…
esiegel | October 18, 2009Music. Dance. Theatre. Take your pick, ranging from something classical like the symphony or the ballet to something modern like musical theatre or fusion dance, there's a world of sights and sounds for you to enjoy.
For an example of a new twist on an old favorite, have a listen to Yo-Yo Ma (on cello) and Bobby McFerrin (on vocals) perform The Flight of the Bumblebee:
Flight of the Bumblebee,As you prepare to enjoy this new world, you may ask yourself, "What qualifies as proper behavior in this new venue?" I have put together a passive-aggressive set of (in)frequently asked questions about…
esiegel | October 16, 2009...we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the…
esiegel | October 15, 2009
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. --Peter Pan
Much like any new venture where the outcome is uncertain, there are a lot of fears surrounding the LHC. And I know, because it occasionally shows up in my comment threads, in my inbox, or in my office.
Could it form a black hole and destroy Earth? Could we somehow do something in the future that would destroy the past? Or is it just generally unsafe?
The answers to these questions are no, no, and no. The first question -- about creating a black hole and destroying Earth -- requires that we apply the laws of…
esiegel | October 14, 2009It's only natural to wonder why things are the ways that they are. Take a look at our Solar System, for example.
A central bulge with planets, moons, and whatnot moving in a disc around it. Is this the way things have to be? My friend Rich, a chemist, asks:
It seems that all the objects in our solar system orbit the sun in nearly the same plane. Why is that? Why doesn't the solar system have spherical symmetry?
In particular, Rich wants to know why our Solar System doesn't look more like this:
Our Solar System is definitely not shaped like a sphere; it definitely is a bulge at the center…
esiegel | October 13, 2009
Barney: Next they're gonna show my movie.
Bart: You made a movie ?
Barney: I made a movie? I wonder why there was a picture of me on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
Earlier this year, a documentary film challenge was issued internationally. The goal was to make a movie about one of this year's two themes: hope or fear.
A group of Oregon filmmakers, The Cingulate System, called me up at work and asked if they could interview me for their film about Dark Matter. The challenge was to make a documentary, from scratch, in under a week. The film premiered April 8th right here in Portland…
esiegel | October 12, 2009My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles.
--Children everywhere, up until very recently
Taking a look at the new ring discovered around Saturn made me realize something. Most of us don't realize how full of crap our Solar System is.
I don't mean planets, or moons, or comets or asteroids, although there are certainly plenty to go around. A brief recap of what happened around Saturn first. Saturn has seven glorious, inner rings that we're familiar with, that make it a magnificent sight for skywatchers everywhere.
If you look closely at this image, you will see a few white dots in…
esiegel | October 10, 2009There's nothing quite like a Bob Dylan song performed to perfection by someone other than Bob Dylan. All Along the Watchtower and Knockin' on Heaven's Door are the most common ones, but a little further off the beaten path is Girl from the North Country, which is knocked out-of-the-park here by Sam Bush.
Now, the college I'm at has issued warnings about the symptoms of both swine and regular flu, and what to do in case of infection. But they've said nothing about that disease that turns you into a zombie.
Thankfully, the University of Florida has come to the rescue, outlining a six-page…
esiegel | October 9, 2009One ring to rule them all,
one ring to find them.
One ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them. --J.R.R. Tolkien
Of course we're all familiar with the planet Saturn. Gas giant, many moons, and, of course, its prominent rings:
Note that word, rings. Sure, at a distance, it may just look like one elongated ring.
But our tools for measurement are better than our mere naked eyes. Saturn was known, very clearly, to have seven separate rings, many of which are separated by large moons in their orbits.
But very recently, a team of astronomers from Maryland and Virginia have discovered…
esiegel | October 8, 2009Earlier this week, I wrote about an article that appeared in Nature, New Scientist and other places. The article -- and especially the popular writeups -- talked about a problem with dark matter and how MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) solves those problems.
And I'm livid about it. Another physicist/scienceblogger thinks my anger is misplaced, and left me the following in my comments section:
Ethan - this is not a creationism debate.
Hong Sheng is a top dynamicist and he knows perfectly well what the issues are.
The whole point of science at this level is to test models and propose…